Actors - Mary Pickford

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	Actors - Mary Pickford

Mary Pickford (April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979) was a Canadian-born motion picture star and co-founder of United Artists, known as "America's Sweetheart," "Little Mary" and "the girl with the golden curls." She was one of the first Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood and one of film's greatest pioneers regardlesss of nationality or background. She was a seminal influence in the development of film acting. Because her international fame was the result of moving images, she is a watershed figure in the history of modern celebrity. And, as silent film's most important performer and producer, her contract demands were central to shaping the Hollywood industry.

Early life

Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her father, John Charles Smith, was the son of British Methodist immigrants, and worked at a variety of odd jobs. Her mother, Charlotte Hennessy, descended from an Irish Catholic family. To please the relatives, Pickford's mother baptized Gladys in both the Methodist and Catholic churches (and used the opportunity to change her middle name to "Marie"). Gladys's father, an alcoholic, left his family in 1895, and died three years later of a cerebral hemorrhage. Charlotte, who had worked as a seamstress throughout the separation, began taking in boarders, and through one of these lodgers Gladys, aged seven, gained a part at Toronto's Princess Theatre in a stock company production The Silver King. She subsequently played in many melodramas and became a popular child-actress in Toronto.

Beginning of career to stardom

Acting soon became a family enterprise, as Charlotte, Gladys, and her two younger siblings Jack and Lottie, toured the United States by rail in rag-tag melodramas. After six impoverished years of touring, Gladys gave herself a single summer to land a leading role on Broadway (she planned to quit acting if she failed). She landed a supporting role in a 1907 Broadway play, The Warrens of Virginia. The play was written by William C. deMille, whose brother, the then-unknown Cecil B. DeMille also appeared in the cast (and later altered the spelling of his last name). David Belasco, the producer of the play, insisted that Gladys Smith assume the stage name Mary Pickford. But after completing the Broadway run and touring the play, Pickford was once again out of work.

On April 19, 1909, the Biograph Company director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her at the company's New York studio for a role in the nickelodeon film "Pippa Passes." The role went to someone else, but Griffith was immediately taken with Pickford, who instinctively grasped that movie acting was simpler and more intimate than the stylized stage acting of the day. Within a few days, Griffith agreed to pay her an astronomical $10 a day against a guarantee of $40 a week. ("Keep it to yourself," he advised her. "There will be a riot if it leaks out." Most Biograph actors earned $5 a day.) Soon, Pickford's comic blend of sweetness and temper had made her not only Biograph's most important player, but the most popular star of the nickelodeon era. In January 1910 she traveled with a Biograph crew to Los Angeles. Many other companies wintered on the west coast, escaping the weak light and short days that hampered winter shooting in the east. Pickford added to her east coast Biographs ("Simple Charity," "An Arcadian Maid," "Wilful Peggy" and "The New York Hat," to name a few) with films from California, including "My Baby," "The One She Loved," and "The Mender of Nets." The advent of feature film sent her fame into the stratosphere. Her appearance in 1914's Tess of the Storm Country represents the major turning point in her career. Her effect in this and similar roles was perfectly summed up by Photoplay magazine: "luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity." Pickford would go on to become Hollywood's biggest female star, earning the right to not only act in her own movies, but produce them and supervise their distribution. She was also the first female actor to receive more than a million dollars per year (the first male actor who made a million-dollar deal was Charlie Chaplin). But the arrival of sound was her undoing. She played a reckless socialite in "Coquette"(1929), a role for which she cut her famous hair into a '20s bob. Pickford's hair had become a symbol of female virtue, and cutting it was front-page news in The New York Times and other papers. But Pickford meant to signal the public that her previous image had been put to rest. Unfortunately, though she won the Academy Award for Coquette, the public failed to respond to her work in roles that reflected her own age. (In the silents, Pickford played adolescents and women in their early 20s, with a celebrated sideline in children's roles.) Then in her 40s, Pickford was unable to play the teenage spitfires so adored by her silent-film fans; nor could she play the soigne heroines of early sound. She retired from acting in 1933, though she continued to produce films for others, including "Sleep My Love" (1948), an update of "Gaslight" with Claudette Colbert.

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Actors - Mary Pickford

Early life

Beginning of career to stardom

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